Internal combustion engines, including diesel engines, gasoline engines, gaseous fuel-powered engines, and other engines known in the art may exhaust a complex mixture of air pollutants. The air pollutants may be composed of gaseous compounds, which may include nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide, and solid particulate matter, which may include unburned carbon particulates called soot.
Due to increased awareness of the environment, exhaust emission standards have become more stringent, and the amount of gaseous compounds and particulates emitted from an engine may be regulated depending on the type of engine, size of engine, and/or class of engine. One method that has been implemented by engine manufacturers to comply with the regulation of emissions has been to remove the gaseous compounds and particulate matter from the exhaust flow of an engine using an exhaust treatment device. An exhaust treatment device may include a filter assembly designed to trap particulate matter, a catalyst, an inlet member to direct exhaust flow through the filter assembly, and an outlet member to direct the exhaust flow away from the filter assembly.
Various filter assemblies may be implemented to reduce the emission of gaseous compounds and/or particulate matter. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,576,045 (the '045 patent) issued to Liu et al. on Jun. 10, 2003, describes a particulate collection system that includes an inlet section, a plurality of intermediate sections having porous media and metal screens, and an outlet section. The inlet, intermediate, and outlet sections have protruding mating flanges secured to each other by bolts.
Although the particulate collection system of the '045 patent may remove particulates from an exhaust flow of an engine, it may be large, difficult to package, and have a limited flow area. In particular, the space on an engine or within a work machine is generally limited, and the mounting flanges of the particulate collection system of the '045 patent being externally located increases the overall diameter of the particulate collection system. Because of the increased diameter, the particulate collection system may be difficult to mount within the available space on the engine or work machine. In addition, because the mounting flanges consume available space on the engine or work machine, the internal flow area of the particulate collection system may be reduced to reserve clearance for the protruding mounting flanges. The reduction in flow area could result in efficiency losses of the engine connected to the particulate collection system.
The disclosed exhaust treatment device is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.